how-to: a necklace

I'm cutting it close again tonight.

Alright. Necklace time. Here's the cast of characters. The essentials. Beads of varying sizes. Some seed beads. A clasp. Tigertail wire. Crimp beads. Some needle-nose pliers. Paper plates, at least

2. Ideal but not necessary are some smaller things to hold beads in. And we're going to pretend I have needle-nose pliers in that picture.

I use an odd number of beads I really like(labeled central beads in the picture) to start with, but then I add in multiple kinds of other beads, and begin to build some kind of pattern around the edge of a plate to see how things will look in the order you place them in. As you make more and more jewelry, you stash, and you have extras, and a monster grows. So pick a color family. You see my reds and golds.

I use each central bead as a jumping off point, and make sure the sides stay symmetric with each other, going off the central bead. Keep going, rearrange till you like it. Add. Subtract. Do as you like. I try to get at least 5 kinds of beads in 2 or 3 colors that coordinate. Are you happy with it? No? Switch some things around? Now? Okay! On we go!

Now, to start, we cut tigertail to length, plus at least an inch. 2 is better; I went with 1 and a half.

Then on goes a crimp bead and the first part of the clasp. Then, the end of the wire goes back through the crimp bead. Crimp beads compress, and there are tools that do this more neatly but needle-nose pliers will do the job. You, at this point, are ready to do a last once-over of your necklace on the edge of the plate to ensure you really like it, although you're honestly never really committed.

You begin stringing beads, tucking the raw, cut end of tigertail in as you go. Now this is where I use seed beads. It's like knotting pearls. One goes in between every bead. And you just string it up. Then, repeat the process of closing adding the clasp at the end of the string, crimp bead, clasp, pull it tight, tucking ends in as you go. If there's a bit of extra space, it won't hurt anything, but get it as tight as you can.

And voila! You have a a necklace. You unfortunately don't have pictures just yet. Because I don't have my adapter. I will add them to the post and put a link in tomorrow's post... But I have Hebrew to do.

And today, I'm thankful for friends and for conversations. It's really good to sit down and talk about things from tv shows to real life things. A great end to a great weekend.